8/24/16

Early on in Carol, an adaptation of Patricia
Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt,
we see Rooney Mara’s character, Therese Belivet, perched in a projection booth
watching Billy Wilder’s classic film noir, Sunset
Boulevard. While Therese’s boyfriend makes hapless advances from behind,
another boy is vigorously taking notes, proclaiming that he’s seen the film six
times, and that he is currently “charting the correlation between what the
characters say and how they really feel.” Perhaps the joke is that Carol plays out mostly through scenes of
smoldering innuendo, but the sight of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond for a
fleeting moment might cue even a casual movie enthusiast to think about Carol through the smoky lens of film
noir.

The
director of Carol, Todd Haynes, has definitely
taken good notes on genre styles of the past, whether he’s experimenting with the
superstar bio-pic via movies about Karen Carpenter, Bob Dylan and the Bowie/Eno
glam-rock era, erecting an homage to the technicolor melodrama’s of Douglas
Sirk in 2002’s Far From Heaven, or
intertwining three genres at once with his first feature length film in 1991, Poison, a poetic commentary on alienation,
punishment, and queer desire that manages to juggle noir horror in the
tradition of Don Siegel or Herk Harvey, a 1980's TV Docu-expose of the Bizarre,
and an Andre Gide prison tale designed in a lavish, theatrical style
reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film, Querelle. The lineage of queer cinema that runs through the work of
Sirk, Fassbinder, and Haynes has reached a strong point of culmination in Carol, which may prove to be Haynes’
most effective film since the rise of the new queer cinema he was such an
essential part of in the early 90’s.

Carol
is punctuated significantly by the shared name of the central character of Haynes’
most acclaimed film from that early period, [Safe],
where Julianne Moore played Carol White, an American housewife suffocated by
aerosol and affluence. Cate Blanchet plays Carol Aird, a wife and mother of the
1950’s whose home environment is similarly suffocating and threatened, but
where Carol White’s character was trapped by the cold, symmetrical architecture
of the suburban 1980’s, Blanchet’s Carol is immaculately trapped by a series of
brooches, gloves, hats, and hairstyles that also mark the difference in social
status between her and her younger lover, Therese.

It was only late in the
film, when Carol and Therese make a somewhat desperate move to seize their
desire for one another in the present, ignoring the consequences of the
inevitable future, the rainy streets and subway grates of the film’s opening
having given way to the dusty parking lot of a remote, Midwestern roadside
motel, that I was reminded of that earlier flash of Norma Desmond, and how
subtly Haynes had transformed Carol
into an unexpected noir. In her influential work on “Women in Film Noir,” Janey
Place defined Desmond as “the most highly stylized ‘spider woman’ in all of
film noir as she weaves a web to trap and finally destroy her young victim, but
even as she visually dominates…she is presented as caught by the same false
value system.” Blanchet’s Carol Aird certainly dominates visually, yet she is
played at a pitch nowhere near the delusional narcissism of Norma Desmond.
Still, how intentionally her web for Therese is woven is ultimately a question
whose answer is as discreet as one of the lover’s initial conversations over a
glass doll case in a department store. Of course, the more important
entanglement to Haynes and Highsmith is one of a false value system in relation
to sexuality, one that treats them like dolls under department store glass.
This is highlighted by Haynes’ persistent presentation of the characters
through rainy car windows, streaked glass, windows and frames, which Place also
writes about as “one of the most common motifs in film noir.” The film’s
circular chronology, along with what Paul Schrader described in his “Notes on Film
Noir” as “an almost Freudian attachment to water” are also utilized in Carol, but the ultimate effect of the
film is not one stuck in the repetition of past styles. And, even though a gun
is introduced in the 3rd Act of the film, the violence of Carol is ultimately not at all physical, but emotional. Haynes
blends these conventions into the film in such a painterly, subdued way that
what we are left with is not just a period homage, but what feels like a new
chapter in progressive, queer cinema.

"The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real. Short of closing one's eyes - in cinema, a difficult and unprecedented act - there is no defense against it."
--Amos Vogel, "Film as a Subversive Art"